Imagine how you are driving now as a skilled driver and years ago when you just got your driving license. There are a lot of specific skills that must be mastered before a driver reaches the level of unconscious competence, e.g., what certain signs and symbols mean, who has the right of way, how to parallel park, and how to master European roundabouts. While all of these skills are important, some are more vital than others because they are critical to success. For sales managers, coaching is such a skill, regardless if they lead a field or an inside sales team.

For most people in sales, coaching is perceived as opportunity coaching even though there are many more aspects of the sales role that must be coached. Furthermore, many salespeople, not only in inside sales, don’t feel “coached,” even if their managers call it that. Let’s start by defining what sales coaching means:

Sales coaching is a leadership skill that develops each salesperson’s full potential. Sales managers use their domain expertise, along with social, communication, and questioning skills to facilitate conversations with their team members that allow them to discover areas for improvement and possibilities to break through to new levels of success.

As importantly, sales coaching is not asking things like, “What’s your forecast this month?” or telling a salesperson, “You need to build more pipeline.” Instead, effective sales coaches consider the salesperson’s personal goals, their style, current strengths and weaknesses before engaging in a dialogue. Then, the focus of such a structured conversation is to discover areas for improvement regarding behaviors and activities that should lead to the desired results.

Coaching areas have to be defined: lead and opportunity coaching, pipeline coaching, coaching skills and behaviors, account and territory coaching

If coaching is reduced to opportunity coaching only, the organization misses out on much of the performance benefits of coaching. At CSO Insights, we separate coaching into five different areas that can be implemented step by step, according to your context:

Lead and opportunity coaching

Pipeline coaching

Coaching skills and behaviors,

Account coaching

Territory coaching

However, in most organizations, sales coaching is currently focused on lead and opportunity coaching only. It’s remarkable that the majority of sales managers in our 2016 Sales Enablement Optimization Study said they spent less than an hour a week coaching leads and opportunities. Lead and opportunity coaching is a great starting point. But it should soon be enriched by coaching skills and behaviors as a foundational coaching layer. Especially for inside salespeople who are working most of their time on the phone, lead and opportunity coaching should always be enriched by coaching skills and behaviors.

Coaching needs to be formal to be effective

Now as you have defined your various coaching areas, it’s about developing a coaching process that follows the customer’s journey. Ideally, your customer’s journey should be mapped to your internal process landscape. If that’s the case, your coaching framework sits directly between the customer’s journey and your internal process landscape, bridging between both sides.

There are four levels of sales coaching maturity:

Random: There is no coaching process defined. Coaching is left up to each manager.

Informal: Coaching guidelines are available, but there is no formal coaching process. Managers are told that they should coach, but there is no monitoring or measurement.

Formal: Coaching areas and the coaching process are defined and implemented. Sales managers are expected to coach accordingly, and there is a formal effort to develop their skills. Periodic reviews help optimize processes and guidelines.

Dynamic: The coaching process is connected to the sales force enablement framework to ensure reinforcement of sales enablement efforts. Sales managers are required to coach; they are measured and compensated accordingly. Ongoing reviews help to not only optimize the process but also to adapt it to market dynamics and the changing selling environment.

In our 2016Sales Enablement Optimization Study, almost 50% of our study participants reported operating based on a random coaching mode. A quarter is working on an informal basis, but only 21.7% have implemented a formal approach, and only 5.3% have made further efforts to align their coaching process with their enablement framework. Our study shows that the coaching approach matters a lot.

Almost 75% of sales organizations waste resources due to random and informal coaching approaches, and only about one-quarter leverage the huge performance potential of formal and dynamic coaching.

If coaching is left up to each manager, sales organizations have a hard time achieving even average performance. Let’s look at win rates for forecast deals as an example. Organizations that use an informal approach end up 4.5 percentage points below the average win rate of 46.2%. That is an actual decrease of 9.8%! Informal approaches start to move things in the right direction, but they lack formal implementation and reinforcement, which leads to a result that’s around average. However, when the approach gets formalized, the win rate improves a significant 5.3 percentage points above average for an actual improvement of 11.5%. The results are even more impressive for a dynamic approach that is based on a holistic sales force enablement program that connects the enablement and the coaching frameworks. In this case, the win rate climbed by 12.9 percentage points, which is an actual improvement of 27.9%.

How could a sales leader ignore a 27.9% better win rate? Investing in sales force enablement to build coaching frameworks and develop sales managers accordingly, especially their coaching capabilities, is the key to achieving the kinds of performance improvements sought by sales leaders everywhere.

This article has been initially written for Top Sales Magazine, September 2017 issue.
Image source: Unsplash Images

Did you know that the women’s right to vote is a challenge that took more than 200 years and is still not achieved everywhere on the planet? The movement began in the 18th century.

But most countries only allowed women to vote starting in the early 20th century – the UK and Germany in 1918 and the US in 1920 – after decades of very painful processes. Many countries in Europe and around the world only followed decades after WWII.

I normally don’t write about gender equality and gender collaboration, simply because it’s not my research focus in my role as research director for CSO Insights. Today is an exception, because we celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8, and because we have the March edition of Top Sales Magazine written entirely by women contributors. Furthermore, and this is probably the most important reason: Women cannot take anything for granted, including what we have already achieved, as recent political trends unfortunately show.

In general, there are always two sides to gender equality. One is the legal part as mentioned above, with the women’s right to vote as an example. The other one is our cultural reality in all aspects of our lives. This cultural dimension is much more important because it shapes the political and the business landscape and the decisions that are made in parliaments and organizations.

Women in sales and sales force enablement – where are the women in sales?

It’s still the sad truth that there are too few women in sales, especially in sales leadership roles. Data provided by LinkedIn suggests that women occupy 39% of sales roles, across the globe and across industries. That means there are far more women in typical female industries such as education and healthcare than, for instance, in technology or high tech. And the number of female sales executives is much smaller; the gap in sales is bigger than in other functions.

When I look at my current role as an analyst, I have to say that the number of female clients I work with is below 10%. And the few women I work with have marketing, sales enablement, sales training, or L&D roles. Just to give you an impression. Why are women so often found in enablement roles rather than in sales roles?

Women prefer a collaborative working environment

This is a personal experience as well as a perspective I hear from many women. Doing great work and creating great results in a collaborative environment seems to be much more attractive to women. And this is a prerequisite for working in a sales enablement role.

Based on our 2016 Sales Enablement Optimization Study, sales force enablement is a highly collaborative discipline that requires enablement leaders and practitioners to collaborate with up to eleven functions. It’s much more than aligning sales and marketing only. Furthermore, the need to set up collaboration in a formal way has a tangible impact on sales performance: Quota attainment is 21% better compared to organizations with “ad hoc” collaboration only.

Based on my own experience in my previous role as the VP of sales force enablement in a large IT organization, setting up collaboration in a formal way across several departments, countries, and cultures is a huge challenge that must not be underestimated. It is by no means a “soft issue” that can be done with second priority or “when we have time” (which never happens in sales as we all know). Instead, it is a mission critical task that requires a clear vision, practical smaller steps, time-consuming calls, meetings, and discussions, and process development and adjustments. Finally, the different players find their “new” place in the game and recognize that they can now achieve even better results than before. Women are often, not always, of course, predestined for leading those processes.

All these skills are important for being successful in sales. And as women are often highly gifted with communication and listening skills as well as with empathy, they have great prerequisites to be successful sales professionals. Especially in the age of the customer, connecting products, services, and solutions to the buyers’ desired business results is much more relevant and successful than talking about features and functions. A value-based selling approach depends on “soft” skills and the ability to connect the dots in increasingly complex buying situations.

These skills are even more important in sales enablement than in pure sales roles. Sales force enablement as a strategic discipline with an orchestrating character requires first and foremost a lot of internal selling to various stakeholders. And as anyone who has tried it knows, internal selling demands excellent communication and listening skills. Additionally, women often have a better connection to their intuition which leads to an excellent sensor for the “corporate weather forecast” and how to adjust their approaches.

Skills once called “soft” are now “must-haves” – More awareness is needed

This trend is a great opportunity for women in sales and sales enablement roles. What’s needed in the industry and among male sales leaders is more sensitivity and more awareness of the situation and the facts at hand. Recognizing changed skill profiles has to be translated into changed hiring profiles and changed, gender-neutral, perceptions. Skills that are admired in men shouldn’t be ranked inadequate in women, as, for instance, being “bossy.” And that requires more women in sales leadership and sales hiring roles so that men AND women look together at candidates to ensure better hiring decisions.

What is world-class? In sports, it is easy to define. World champions and Olympic medalists are world-class. But what is world-class in sales? Revenue performance? Maybe, but how do you get there? What are the behaviors that drive world-class sales performance?

At CSO Insights, we are passionate about all things sales performance. We research sales performance from different perspectives, including behavioral and metric perspectives. We investigate, for instance, the roles of sales process and sales management, the growing impact of strategic sales force enablement, and the roles of technology and compensation.

Our CSO Insights 2016 Sales Best Practices Study has just been released. “Drawing Back the Bow” is this year’s cover story. It creates an umbrella theme for the 12 behaviors that have the greatest impact on sales performance.

For the thirteenth year, this study identifies those behaviors that have the biggest impact on sales performance, measured by well known key performance indicators such as quota attainment, qualified opportunities, new account acquisition, YOY existing customer growth or average account billing. Top performers in these areas do a few things differently. They focus on what matters. They focus on the top behaviors that have the greatest impact on sales performance, collectively and consistently. And that makes a huge difference.

The world-class segment is only 7.7% of the overall study population of more than 1,700 respondents, 1,200 of whom work in complex sales. But they achieved 21% better sales performance.

A sales performance difference this large cannot be ignored by any sales leader. Now, what are these top behaviors that drive sales performance, and what does it take to become excellent at those behaviors, to become a world-class performer?

From the top 12 behaviors we have three behaviors that were also top behaviors last year:

Sales and marketing are aligned in what our customers want and need (World-Class 94%, All Respondents 39%)

The key differentiator to successful sales and marketing alignment is this: being aligned to “what our customers want and need.” And that means beginning with the customer’s journey as the main design point when addressing this challenge. Here are four steps to improve sales and marketing alignment in a “customer-core” way:

Shared vision of success: A shared vision describes how the organization creates value for the customers and how success will be measured. Following the customer’s journey makes it easier to create this vision, and revenue contribution has to be one of the measures of success for both sales and marketing.

Shared strategy to create value in every interaction: A shared strategy for creating and delivering customer value is necessary―from first contact and all the way through the buying decision and the customers using the products, services, and solutions successfully.

Shared marketing, sales, and service processes: Based on this shared vision and strategy, sales and marketing have to agree on a shared sales and marketing process, ideally powered by integrated engagement and selling methodologies. It is essential that these efforts continue after the buying decision has been made.

Shared technology: Integrated processes require integrated technology from the website to marketing automation to sales enablement to the CRM system. Integration is mandatory to leverage the potential of successful sales and marketing alignment.

Our organization is highly effective in allocating the right resources to pursue large deals (World-class 94%, all respondents 40%)

Allocating the right resources to the right opportunities is a challenge for most organizations because resources are like budgets—there is never enough to go around. In many organizations, it’s still the loudest voice that gets the biggest share. But the right resources should only be placed on the most valuable deals to increase the probability of winning those deals. For example, sales managers evaluating deals should consider the strategic value for the customer and the value for the sales organization. It is exactly this deal evaluation process that is often missing in many sales management approaches. When decisions about investments and resource allocation have to be made, the process of making those decisions should be tied to the sales process and the decision gates the customer must go through.

When coaching sales professionals on leads and opportunities, sales managers should always investigate where the customer is along their customer’s journey. As soon as a deal comes close to the customer’s “change the status quo” decision, the sales manager and salesperson should also evaluate this deal against others. Ideally, this step takes place in a funnel coaching session, as it’s about evaluating this deal in the context of other opportunities being worked by the salesperson or the sales team.

We know why our top performers are successful (World-class 94%, all respondents 44%)

Look at the performance rankings of any sales team, and it becomes evident that not all salespeople are created equal. There are often key performers who regularly appear on the top of the chart. Just how valuable are these individuals?

Firms that excel at knowing who their top performers tend to focus on assessing three things. First, they determine the skills and competencies that sales professionals apply in their daily workflow. Doing so, they not only assess what top salespeople are doing, but also how they do it. And that’s a key finding for any sales force enablement approach, especially for onboarding and coaching. Second, they assess talent, the “behavioral DNA.” Third they assess the cultural fit because not every A-player is an A-player in every culture.

The key benefits of this approach are to understand what makes your top performers successful (we all know who they are!). Then, sales force enablement has to ensure that best practices can be shared and that the hiring process is consistently adjusted based on the latest assessment findings. Furthermore, enablement leaders have to ensure that their onboarding process is tailored accordingly.

Sailing requires a lot of capabilities. As a sailor you learn various mechanical principles – how the equipment works, and based on that, what to do on the sailboat. You have to become an experienced sailing practitioner to be able to sail the ocean. But these mechanical skills aren’t sufficient. You also have to learn the essentials of how to navigate.

Sailing experience is actually built on all the things you can control – managing the sailing mechanics on the boat – and on your ability to navigate all the things you cannot control – nature’s dynamics.

Mechanics are predictable. Dynamics are probabilities in uncertainty

Imagine the mechanical steps you take to create a new account or a new opportunity in your CRM system. Mechanics describe precisely in which way something has to be done. Mechanics have a lot to do with “if/then” clauses. In this example, you need the account data before you can create your opportunity. Mechanics are pretty predictable. If all the required data are entered, a new account or a new opportunity will be created.

Dynamics instead represent probability, possibility, and uncertainty in often complex environments. Imagine your recent conversations with different B2B buying teams. Were these situations predictable? You have probably developed a few scenarios to get prepared for the conversations. But at the end, a slightly different scenario may have happened. Dynamics are not really predictable.

Navigating different dynamics along the customer’s journey

Change dynamics in the awareness phase of the customer’s journey:
A challenge occurs, the situation gets analyzed, and options for tackling the challenge are discussed. Customer stakeholders often come from different functions and roles, and have different approaches regarding how to address the situation. The key question is, “Do we change the current state for a better future state: Yes or no?” The decision can be “yes,” “no,” or “not now.” For sales professionals, the biggest challenge here is to provide perspectives that help the stakeholders make a decision to change the current state for a better future state.

Decision dynamics in the actual buying phase of the customer’s journey:
The buying team may change, because some senior executives may delegate the project and procurement people may join the buying team. Decision dynamics are focused on how to make the best buying decision as a team with different perspectives and approaches to achieve the best results and wins with the lowest possible risks. Decision dynamics have different characteristics than change dynamics. For sales professionals, the biggest challenge is to contribute to the customer’s value calculation in a way that’s beyond TCO or product-driven ROIs to be perceived as the best possible buying option. Business value ideally tackles the top or the bottom line.

Value dynamics in the implementation and adoption phase:
When the implemented products and services deliver the value that has been bought, thoughtful value confirmations tailored for each buyer role are they key to developing future business. This step is often overlooked, but as buyers have different approaches regarding how to tackle a situation, they will also have different perceptions of value.
For sales professionals, the biggest challenge is to get back to the initially involved senior executives, even if they have delegated the project for implementation. These value confirmation conversations can lead directly to new opportunities.

What makes the difference in these situations? Mechanics or dynamics?

Mechanics, as we defined the term above, are everything that can be controlled by the sales professionals. Dynamics are what happens in reality, in complex situations with different stakeholders, and their different approaches, changing objectives and an often-changing situational context. In those complex, often unpredictable environments, sales professionals need a solid foundation of skills and competencies, customer, market and product knowledge, strategies and specific expertise – just to remain in the game. What makes the difference is their ability to quickly adjust their strategies, behaviors and activities to new, changed and complex situations. That’s navigating dynamics.

Developing adaptive competencies happens in iterations of training, practice, learning and coaching Whatever the specific challenges in a sales organization might be, a solid foundation of selling competencies, various knowledge areas, and customer management strategies has to be in place before adaptive competencies can be developed. You don’t train a new sailor to navigate the ocean before learning the basics.

Adaptive training sessions can consist of various highly interactive sessions, including real-world simulations. Those curriculums should consider cycles of training, practice, and learning, reinforced by coaching before the next cycle begins with training. Those cycles ensure that people can learn what works for them and adjust what didn’t work so far. This approach also requires that coaching is an integral part of reinforcing and building adaptive competencies. Integrating the frontline sales managers early builds the foundation for execution and reinforcement. Key learning objectives should include situational awareness, applying principles instead of rules, and creativity, as well as critical and strategic thinking.

Adaptive competencies are what sales professionals need as an add-on to their mechanics. Adaptive competencies enable them to navigate the dynamics of today’s ever-changing, complex, buyer-driven world.

Questions for you:

How do you navigate complex B2B buying dynamics?

How important is the alignment of your sales process to the customer’s journey to successfully navigate buying dynamics?

What was your last bad experience as a prospect – just a short time after you downloaded something from a website? Maybe this example sounds familiar for you, too. I was interested in a report that had been published on a vendor’s blog. I downloaded the document. Less than an hour later, I got a call to “follow-up.” Would I be interested in the vendor’s products? Bad, very bad. I asked her if she had checked out my LinkedIn or my Twitter profile to prepare this call? Of course, she did not. Even more interesting, she made this call for a large provider of social technology. Ouch.

What’s wrong? The call was out of any context, not connected to my role, my potential challenges and the company I’m working for. Not valuable for me. And not relevant.

I care about lead management behaviors for two reasons. First, because I care about all things sales force enablement and how to get more effective in a “customer-core” way. Second, because I work as an analyst in this fascinating space and I do believe that successful sales enablement begins very early along the customer’s journey. So, I have skin in the game.

Bad lead management practices like this follow-up call happen every minute a thousand times. These practices not only ruin your brand reputation, but they also wreck potential future business opportunities.

Quantity over quality leads only to more bad calls – focus on effectiveness first

The problem with so many bad lead follow-up calls has one cause: measuring quantity over quality. Why should it be the right way to measure the number of calls instead of the outcomes of those calls? Yes, we have to be quick with follow-up calls. And yes, we need to know how many calls are made by person by time frame. But there is a difference between a bad call half an hour after the web page interaction or a much better call within the next few hours. But more bad lead follow-up calls are not effective, regardless how efficient they are processed. Even worse, bad follow-up calls damage not only your brand reputation, but they also block this customer’s potential future interest in any of your products and services. Whether you conduct those lead follow-up calls internally or with an agency, measuring success must be based on effectiveness, not on efficiency only, if you want to move the performance needle in any way.

Call preparation begins with – social media

“We have no time to prepare our calls.” I hear you. Please explain to me why you have time to make lots of bad calls with poor outcomes? Why not make fewer calls with better outcomes? Please ensure just one mandatory step: The person must check the prospect’s social profiles before the call (not just taking the mapped CRM data, or even worse – nothing) such as the prospect’s current role, potential areas of interest and challenges to connect the dots to your products and services. Only then can the salesperson open the call in a smarter way that connects the dots to the potential prospect’s role and context. A much better idea in the case, as mentioned above, could have been to say “Hello…, we appreciate your interest in our content. How was the XYZ document valuable or relevant for you? … As I have seen on LinkedIn, you are working as an analyst. So, what’s of specific relevance for you in your role?” Etc…

Needless to say, I would have been much more engaged in such a conversation than the above-mentioned bad examples, and with no damage to the vendors’ brand. What’s so difficult about doing it this way? It only requires evident homework, preparation that would prove that someone would care about me as a potential customer. Instead, I felt treated just like another damned prospect.

Making lead follow-up calls effective with coaching

This simple step helps to sort out prospect roles that are not relevant as a potential buyer (e.g., me in an analyst role) which reduces the number of calls to make and increases the potential effectiveness of those calls. Now, let’s look at how to increase the effectiveness of those calls. There are lots of ways to get the necessary insights for coaching sales or marketing people running these calls: riding along, analyzing recorded versions, and so on, always combined with predictive analytics regarding call outcomes from the prospect’s perspective. Also, compare the approaches different people on the team may take. Understanding what works and what doesn’t, and where and how to make the necessary changes, is key to success. Maybe the messaging has to be adjusted for specific buyer roles; maybe the guided script has to be changed. Or maybe, just more and better practice and coaching is the key to more effectiveness. Understanding what works and what doesn’t, adjusting the activities and behaviors. Only then, when we know that we process the right activities in the best possible set-up, can training, practicing and coaching really improve the effectiveness of those calls.

This application management deal is a “must-win” deal. We have the best solution, we have a great relationship with the customer and we save them a lot of money with this new cloud-based service. We all know overconfident sales statements like this one, don’t we? But then, all of a sudden, the deal goes south. The customer makes a decision for a competitor. Why? Because this competitor offered a much bigger business impact, connected to the customer’s relevant financial metrics. It’s a disaster for the sales team, the funnel and the quarter.

Cost savings are a translation of features and functions into a financial equivalent. Cost savings don’t connect to the customer’s desired business results per se. They are a prerequisite for getting to their specific business value.

Cost savings are still in the category of what a product, a service or a solution IS (features and functions) and what it DOES (saving money), but not what these cost savings MEAN to the customer. The typical question of a CFO kind of role will be: “So what?” In our 2015 MHI Sales Best Practices Study, we identified critical customer behaviors. One of these behaviors is that customers decide how they calculate value. In this year’s study, 61% of the world-class sales performers indicated that their customers require formal calculations on business value (ROI, TCO, and specific business cases, etc.) before making a buying decision, compared to 39% the year before. Look at this huge hike from 2014 to 2015, and consider that only 35% of all respondents indicated the same customer requirement (versus 26% in 2014). Now, what are world-class sales performers doing differently?

World-class sales performers know that their products, services, and solutions are only one element in the customer’s approach to solving a problem or mastering a challenge.

Value always lies in the eyes of the beholder, the customer. As customers make every decision differently, every time, the customer’s desired business value has to be different from the provider’s product-oriented cost savings. There is a natural gap by definition. This gap is one of the reasons why traditional ROI calculators never impress a customer stakeholder who has a financial focus. Those ROI calculators are, most of the time, product-oriented, which means they only cover one element of the customer’s solution, the provider’s offerings.

That means that in the customer’s business case, the offered product’s cost savings will often be only one line item. World-class sales performers know how their cost savings can impact other financial metrics in general. Their expertise in understanding the customer’s context and the stakeholders’ different concepts allows them to figure out which financial metrics are important for this buying team, this time. They also identify the strategic business initiatives and connect the dots between their product-based cost savings, the directly impacted financial metrics and their impact on the customer’s strategic business initiatives.

Understand your customer’s financial performance and identify financial metrics that matter to them

Many sales professionals were trained to focus on their ROI and TCO as discussed above. That worked as long as (in our example of a cloud-based application management), IT departments and technical buyers made the decisions alone. Now, as we observe a huge shift to business buyers and cross-functional and complex buying teams, business value calculations become very different. Why is this the case? Because there are no IT projects anymore. Every IT project that exists has at least one business reason, why it exists. Consequently, business values are calculated differently. In general there is a switch from efficiency and budget optimization to effectiveness and investment thinking.

Understanding your customers’ current financial performance and their goals are the first step to identifying metrics that make a difference to them. Financial reports, analyst views, strategic initiatives are great sources to educate yourself. Learning additional financial metrics such as e.g. return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE), operating costs, cash flow, EBIT and EBITDA, as well as net and gross profit margins are essential to create outstanding value for your customers next time.

Create a value mapping chart for the entire buying team

Such a document includes the business reasons for every buyer, their desired solution and their desired tangible results and intangible wins, and how they measure success. Then, map back to the relevant metrics of the strategic initiatives, identify alignments, gaps and maybe inconsistencies. Then, come up with an overall approach to your customer’s business value calculation, integrating the stakeholders’ relevant metrics. Being prepared like this shows that you work backward from the customer’s context, and the stakeholders’ different concepts and that you made a lot of efforts to create extraordinary value for them. That’s the entry ticket to have effectiveness and investment focused conversations on eye-level. This is where you should be to win the next deals.